Samstag, 26. Juni 2010

IE9 to be GPU accalerated - Firefox-2.0+ too ;)

There seems to be quite a hype caused by the fact that the IE9 preview builds use Direct2D to accelerated HTML/SVG/Canvas rendering.I always wonder why people didn't hype Firefox the same way, when FireFox-2.0 was released in Oct. 2006 it did exactly the same thing - using Cairo on top of XRender.That was 4 years before Microsoft will release IE9 :P

FireFox-3.6 does even well on the IE9 canvas/svg demos:

(Granted, I had to scale down the background image, my weak intel-IGP has limited texture size of 2048x2048px)

Its also a good demonstration why the usual QT/KDE-Statement "we won't work on our XRender backend, the raster engine is faster anyway" isn't that clever.

Kommentare:

I didn't know that, indeed, I just checked - Firefox on Linux is indeed hw accelerated, on windows it's a lot slower.However, the upcoming IE9 release seems a much more powerful beast.With FF 3.6 on Linux I was below 60 FPS (at 50 actually) using 100 fish (same with latest FF 4.0 build), but IE9 still was at 60FPS with 250 fish - that's quite a lot more powerful. Tested on same computer with same latest version of Nvidia's driver (v.256) on Linux and Win7.So, as much as I hate M$ I have to admit that I think their hw acceleration is gonna beat even the acceleration in the Linux's Firefox 4.0 version. Direct2D is probably more powerful than (x)Render if considered as an apple-to-apple comparison.I heard the next version of Cairo 1.10 is gonna be faster, remains to be seen just how much faster and if only on Intel's hw.

The whole issue is not just about blits I guess, it's also about how much stuff gets accelerated including removing redundant calls in the (OpenGL) state machine and who knows what else.Yes, on the other hand we can blame either Firefox or the drivers, is that what you prefer?